Google Play Services will stop supporting the "Jelly Bean" platform

Google Play officially announced that future versions of Google Play services will no longer support the Android Jelly Bean (hereinafter referred to as JB) platform, corresponding to API levels 16, 17, and 18.

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The JB platform was first released nine years ago, and as of July 2021, its number of active devices has fallen below 1%. In addition, Android has released many optimizations and features, but none of them have been synchronized to JB, which has increased the time developers and QA spend on new features that require special processing. Therefore, the official said that starting from August 2021, Google will no longer update Play services APKs beyond version 21.30.99 for devices running JB.

For developers, applications that support API levels 16 to 18 can continue to be built and released to devices running JB, but may encounter build errors when updating to newer SDK versions. In this regard, the official provides two suggestions:

Set the minSdkVersion value in your app's build.gradle to 19 to use API level 19 as the minimum supported API level. If you publish your app to the Play Store this way, users of devices that support a lower level than that will not be able to see or download the update. However, they will still be able to download and use the most recently released version of your app for their device.

With configuration and code management, build multiple APKs to support different minimum API levels and use different versions of Google Play services, for example by defining two different app configurations in build.gradle.

 productFlavors {
 legacy
 minSdkVersion 16
        versionCode 101 // Min API level 16, v01
 }
 current​
 minSdkVersion 19
        versionCode 1901 // Min API level 19, v01
 }
 }
 dependencies {
    legacyCompile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:16.0.0'  
    currentCompile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:17.0.0'  
 }

For more details, please refer to its official announcement.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Google Play Services will stop supporting the "Jelly Bean" platform

Article URL: https://www.oschina.net/news/149701/google-play-service-discontinue-support-jelly-bean